Brendon Ayanbadejo's days with the Baltimore Ravens have come to an end, but his fight for same-sex marriage equality carries on, no matter the timeline.

After telling The Baltimore Sun on Friday that a group of up to four players is considering coming out publicly, Ayanbadejo downplayed the immediacy of that event during an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, who asked if Ayanbadejo knew the identity of the players.

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"No, actually, what it is is, is there's organizations that I'm in contact with, and there's individuals I'm in contact with and collectively we know of some gay players," Ayanbadejo said Friday night. "And these players, some of them are anonymous, some of them we know who they are, but their identity is super secret and nobody wants to reveal who they are, and some of them, they don't want to reveal who they are, rightfully so, because it's entirely up to them what they are going to do."

Some critics have pounced on Ayanbadejo for backtracking on his earlier claims, but if the timeline has softened on what would serve as a major event in sports -- and American -- history, Ayanbadejo's passion for the topic has not.

"What we want to facilitate is getting them all together so they can lean on each other, so they can have a support group," Ayanbadejo told CNN. "And potentially it's possible, it's fathomable, that they could possibly do something together and break a story together, and one of them had voiced that he would like to break his story with somebody else, and not do it alone, and that's all I'm saying."